European Taxi Drivers Rediscover Streisand Effect With Uber Protest

One of the more interesting little economic effects of the internet is the "Streisand Effect". This comes from a little episode some years ago when Barbra Streisand objected to someone posting an aerial view of her house on the internet. She complained about this and the publicity of her complaint meant that millions then knew that there was a picture of Barbra Streisand's house on the internet. And of course millions then went to look at it.

Much the same thing has now happened to those thousands of taxi drivers who protested against Uber yesterday in several European cities. It's fine for them to protest, of course, freedom of speech and freedom of association are vital civil liberties which should not be curtailed in any manner. And they're also facing the wiping out of their cosy little guild arrangements that protect their incomes as they face the creative destruction of an innovative disruptor. We'd all be rather surprised if they didn't protest about this.

However, the truth is, however much we in the economic and tech press write about how awesome Uber is, it's still relatively unknown out there in the general population. At least, this is true over here in Europe. So protesting about something that most people don't know about yet always has the possibility of simply alerting more people to the availability of the thing that you don't want them to be using or doing. This does appear to be what has happened.

Commuters in capital cities across Europe faced traffic chaos on Wednesday as cab drivers in London, Paris, Berlin and Madrid blocked streets to protest over the Uber taxi hailing app.

Paris commuters faced gridlock when hundreds of taxis drove at a snail’s pace in an “escargot” operation on main routes into the city, while in London more than 10,000 black cab drivers planned to jam the streets around Trafalgar Square in a protest police said was illegal.

OK, so the cabbies are protesting. But the end result might not please them quite so much:

Up to 10,000 taxi drivers brought gridlock to central London on Wednesday as they protested against Uber, the mobile application that has become popular in cities across Europe.

The protests are estimated to have caused an estimated £125 million in lost revenue.

But Uber reported a massive spike in downloads of their mobile application on Wednesday.

Jo Bertram, the app's UK and Ireland general manager, said it had seen its biggest day of sign ups since it launched in London two years ago - an 850 per cent increase in downloads compared to last Wednesday.

That's the Streisand Effect in action there. Or if not exactly and precisely the formal definition of it, it's a very close corollary. However, we shouldn't take all and every post making this point entirely seriously. For example, this at the Guido Fawkes blog (for those not up to date with the UK, this is the leading political blog in the country. A bit more muckraking but as important as The Hill is in the US political world.). Of those ten people tweeting that the strike has led them to download Uber, well, I know at least three of those people and the idea that they didn't know about Uber before this is laughable. They are, in what we English might call a reverse ferret, making a political point themselves rather than commenting entirely openly on what they really did yesterday.

Which brings us back to the basic point. If most people don't know about the service that you don't want them to use then having a mass demonstration about that service might not be a very good idea. Because it's going to lead to many more people finding out about that service that you don't want them to be using.